Writing a Resume for the First Time

A friend of mine had held a few short jobs in his youth before landing a position at the company where he would continue working for many more years. Within this company he held different positions and had a variety of responsibilities depending on what he was doing at the time. After twenty years he retired and spent a little time doing pretty much nothing. It turns out that doing nothing can get dull, and having some sort of income is kind of nice, so he decided to get a fun job. Having made this decision, he realized that, not only did he not have a resume, he had no idea how to summarize what he had been doing for most of his adult life.

When he talked to me about how hard it was to write a brand new resume when you had many years to fill it with, I decided that this was just the kind of challenge I like. I pondered my approach for a while, and these are the steps I took to write up a good resume from scratch.

List all your jobs

We thought about every job he had ever held, and listed them chronologically. I mean everything, starting with driving an ice cream truck when he was 18. While it seemed unlikely I’d be using that experience, I wanted to have everything in front of me. We ended with what he had been doing for the last several years, even though he wasn’t getting paid, i.e. it wasn’t a “job”.

Fill out the details

After listing everything with start/stop dates, we started filling out with titles and responsibilities. This was the hardest part, really. Think back on jobs you’ve held. Can you tell me what you did when? What your titles were? How many people you supervised? This is the kind of thing that most job-hoppers put in their resumes on a continual basis. To do it all at once for thirty years of work history was quite a task. It required that I pay attention to what he was saying, and stop to ask questions. It’s hard for a single person to get at the details of what he or she has done without an outsider making sure the times and tasks all add up. It didn’t happen in one go-through, instead there were plenty of jump-aheads and returns for something forgotten. Writing up everything on a word processor, as opposed to paper and pencil, made this easier to accomplish. Once you’ve got everything down, I recommend putting it away for a few hours, then returning to give it one more run through. The next part is harder to fill in if you’ve forgotten to put a job into this section.

Write duties as accomplishments and skills

Next I re-wrote everything as accomplishments and achievements. Everything, even the ice cream truck. “Learned time management skills and self motivation as a teenager while driving an ice cream truck during the summer”. This is why you want to make sure you’ve gotten everything in order and accounted for. Each job, position, set of responsibilities should build on previous achievements. Again, the ice cream truck didn’t figure in to the final resume, but for a younger person with a shorter work history, it could have. “The self motivation and time management I learned in my teens at my summer position has continued to benefit my employer at my current position as I am able to accomplish my tasks efficiently and skillfully.” You get the idea.

Refine what to include

After writing out in length, every skill or attribute acquired over his work history, we then discussed what types of positions he’d like to apply to. For him, it was easy. He had a very short list of what he’d like to do, and where he’d like to do it. We were able to select which skills would be applicable and come up with a single resume to suit his goals. For a person with a wider choice of possible jobs, there’s nothing wrong with creating more than one resume. You don’t need to tell every potential employer every single thing about you. If you’re applying for a job in retail, they don’t care if you can fix lamps. Tailor your resume to the job, and only include what would be useful to the employer. Think about the job for which you’re applying, what you would do in that position, and what parts of your work history fit that description.

Make it pretty

Choose a format that you like. Popular formats change with time, so do some searching online for examples or ask friends what they used. Generally a person with a great education but not much experience will list their schooling first. Someone with a longer work history usually puts the education last since it’s no longer as important as your experience. For my friend, we did a chronological work history starting from current and going backwards. This meant listing his time being retired, but he presented the whole resume as looking for a job to enjoy while being retired, so it worked well. If you have gaps in your work history, it’s better to say something rather than leave a blank chunk of time; it will look like you sat around on your butt and did nothing. Put in volunteer activities, or spin your time as a stay at home time to reflect running a small company (which it kind of is). Unless you really did just sit around in your underwear and watch television, there’s almost always something good you can say about your use of time while you weren’t working.

Check your work

Finally, type it up and print it out. Read your resume six more times to check for typos or obvious grammar errors. Make sure you like the way it looks and change anything that doesn’t please you. A lot of work, but we ended up with a great resume that could be used for multiple positions. Now all he has to do is keep it updated instead of starting all over.

Did it work? My friend applied to one job and was hired within three days. It worked perfectly.

Comments

May 27, 2013 9:26am

dieselfit
This is a pretty straightforward article, I could always use some help with resumes as im sure everyone else always has the same challenge. i always see resumes that are about 5 pages long and I'm almost certain it can be turned into one page! Thanks for the article

NU_Law_Student
Thanks for posting something like this for the readers. One of the most important things to remember when creating a resume is not to over embellish. Don't under-sell yourself, but don't turn "Driving an Ice Cream Truck" into "Italian desert consultant". People viewing the resume, although it looks more impressive, will see right through that.

Jun 11, 2013 10:08am

JestMe
That's a good point. Even if the embellishment gets missed the first time, it would be a huge embarrassment later on to lose a job because your resume was discovered to be 'less than accurate'.

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